Quite a year; bit of an odd decade
Becoming something new... with help.
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Sorry I’m late; way too-long post…
This post was supposed to be done in January, as my retrospective of all I’ve been doing the last year, to catch everyone up and thank the supporters and friends and benefactors who continue to make it all possible. Then I spent most of January and February sick, first with a bad coughing cold, and then a few weeks later - on Candlemas - slapped down with a mysterious flu that left me close to incapacitated. All work of any kind halted completely in favour of sleep and meds. Today, Ash Wednesday, [update: it’s a week later now] has been my first day more or less mentally functional and capable of sitting up at my desk.
All that gave me a long time to think about things.
Quite a year: Death and Fin de siècle
Every death is the end of an age, because in each person is a whole world of reality that he takes with him right out of the world. It’s not true that when we die we take nothing with us; we take ourselves, all that we’ve done and thought and said, all that we are, and all that we might have been. This has been a year of losses both public and private; people I know, some of whom I depended on, have gone through that big black door. Others are getting ready.
We lost Her Majesty, and I felt as though it was the final clanging shut of the door to the old world, my old world, the one I’d grown up in and can’t ever get back to. I don’t think any other person in this modern world better exemplified the old idea of vocation than she did. She fulfilled what was thrust upon her with heroic selflessness. One can only hope to do half as well.
I’ve asked myself, What do I want to be doing on my last day? It’s not writing articles about politics. If I don’t have enough to time left to get where I want to be with this work, at least I want to be on the road when the moment comes.
The Samwise step
And figuring out a new direction and gathering the courage to walk in it has occupied nearly all my thoughts for some time.
While I realise my posting here has been sporadic at best, it’s because my priorities have definitively shifted and I didn’t quite know what to say about it. People following me, some for many years, have come to expect lots of polemics and apart from the occasional Twitter thread I’ve pretty much left that behind. I have been frankly a bit reluctant to write about it lest long-time readers get disappointed and bored.
But I’ve been a writer and researcher for a very long time and I've always had a driving curiosity. In my professional life that faculty was focused far too long in one very unsavoury direction. After 20 years of news and political briefs - about unspeakably terrifying, real-life Lovecraftian eldritch horrors-beyond-human-comprehension - that natural curiosity and wonder was finally entirely suppressed by cynical disgust.1 And, like Denethor peering into the Palantir, nearly all joy in life was tainted and extinguished by it; it was all true, but it was all awful. Eventually even my sense of hope was overshadowed.
I'll risk sharing now, eight years later, that I really did just walk away one day in an act of self-preservation, right in the middle of everything. Cracked, I guess, under what had become intolerable interior pressures of mind and heart. But in the time I’ve been entirely away from it, looking quite deliberately at beautiful and wondrous things, the old curiosity and eagerness to know has finally started to bloom again.
In the last three years I’ve been almost laser-focused on Christian sacred art, its history and meaning across many centuries and cultures- from 1st century Egypt to Byzantium to medieval Italy and northern Europe - as well as every aspect and detail of technique that I can learn. I am returning to an ancient love, from all the way back to a childhood piled high with art books, which is why it feels more like returning than going away.
Soundtrack for the post
Long post ahead: you’ll be needing some music.
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How I felt as a little kid growing up in Victoria and Beachcomber, gardening with Grandpa, painting and cooking with Grandma, poking around tide pools, climbing around on the rocks and building forts at the beach, collecting shells and fossils and climbing trees:
What the world looked like when I did journalism:
How I felt all the time:
How I felt when I moved to Norcia, got to know the monks and became an oblate:
How I’m starting to feel now, nearly ten years after getting out and starting to paint and live in Narni:
Not quite ready for the Grey Havens, but definitely feeling better.
Bit of an odd decade, to be honest
As one does at the end of a year, I started thinking about the past, and was drawn back to twelve years ago. In February 2011 I was diagnosed with cancer. In January 2012 I got the news from the oncologists that my cancer was gone. It took another year to recover from treatments. But that was the moment I realised my life had ceased to be on hold, that I had to start it up again. And I had no idea what to do.
In 2009, about a year after I moved to Italy, I started studying classical academic drawing part time at a private atelier in Rome, while keeping up my full time job. It didn’t take long to figure out which I liked better.
The rigorous, highly disciplined training is intended to create professionals. I was aware I was doing something serious intended to facilitate a shift from writing to painting.
That was the plan, but at that time I still had no real idea what exactly I wanted to paint. Nor did I have any confidence I could make a go of it.
Cancer changes everything
But cancer made everything different. It took a while to understand that what had been going on before was now irrecoverably gone. At the end of it all I found I just couldn’t step back into the old life. It’s not so much that I felt things had to change; it’s that in a year of treatment and another of recovery, they had changed and I needed to catch up.
I didn’t really come to understand how much until I’d spent a couple of years trying to live the old life. By 2015, I knew I couldn’t keep forcing myself to carry on that way.
Lots of further adventures followed - moved up to Norcia in Umbria in 2014; became an oblate of the monastery there and started thinking about painting in a serious way.
And then this happened
But the decision to make a final change didn’t come until after the 2016 earthquake forced me out of the haven of Norcia.
I became an exile again, finally settling for a time in a little out-of-the-way farmhouse near Perugia, to try to catch my breath and figure out what to do. I was at a loss, in every sense.
I’d lost my home, but also my bearings, my sense of who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. After a lifetime following the trail of breadcrumbs, I’d suddenly lost my path forward. In a moment of desperation, in October 2019, I went down to Rome to meet with old colleagues. It wasn’t really until then that I understood how much I’d moved away from all that. It was a closed door.
But the same week, wandering randomly around Trastevere, I found an advert for an iconography class posted in the window of the good old art supply shop. Mostly because I had no other ideas, I started in November. I was 53. Hell of a time of life to be starting over, but sometimes we don’t get to decide these things.
About eight weeks after I’d finished the icon painting course, in early March 2020 and had my first commission, lockdowns started and there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
From the moment I started the icon class three years ago, I knew I was finally back on the right track, after decades going wrong. Painting, and studying Christian sacred art, all its history, techniques, language and meaning, stepped into the gap, and took all my attention.
Learning new tricks: an art school of one
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to teach myself to paint; so that’s where I’ve poured most of my energy in the last year. There are online courses, Patreon pages, YouTube videos and Instagram, Facebook groups to show your work to people who are better than you so you can get useful critiques. But for the most part, there’s having a go, just giving it a try and figuring it out.
The other most important thing has been just to look at the art, “waste” a lot of time looking at the works themselves. Going to museums and look at the real thing, getting up as close as they'll let me2. And spelunking in odd corners of the internet. It's not ideal, but with the internet, it's getting easier to be self-taught. “
I can’t think of any other circumstances in which I would be able to get close enough to see how Simone Martini did the clothing of the angel of the Annunciation, for example. What you can’t see, even standing in the room with it, or in the high-resolution photos posted to the Uffizi’s website, is that it is painted over a ground of tooled gilding.
I found a file of photographs on Flickr giving extreme close-ups:
Needless to say, this technique is beyond my current skill level, but now I know where we’re heading and how it was done.
Commissions and patrons: how to live while you’re learning
A pretty big issue is getting up the courage to try, and that’s where the commissioning clients have been so crucial. Two years ago I had a commission for an icon of Our Lady (above) and the client wanted a gilded halo. Up to that point I had been avoiding gilding. I’d been taught the basics in my class, but it hadn’t gone well. I was able to screw my courage to the sticking place thanks to the encouragement of the client.
I did some more reading on gilding techniques, consulted some iconographers and forged ahead. It turned out all right and that alone helped me get the nerve to move a few more inches forward.
When I moved to Narni in November 2021, I brought this painting with me half finished:
I had never done a full gilded panel before, and the client was again very encouraging. And patient, since the methods I was proposing were going to slow the process down considerably. The mottled effect on the gold came from adding hundreds of tiny pieces of gold leaf adhered with oil-based size, dabbed on with a brush - a process that took a week.
And that’s how it’s worked with every step in the last few years, every new challenge. I don’t paint things for my own walls, since my whole interest personally is to learn as much as possible. The ownership of the object itself is of interest to the clients and customers. I’m absorbed by the process.
Clients have encouraged me, given me a sense of accountability, and helped to dissipate the feeling of isolation. I want them to have input and be involved, and maybe even to learn something they didn’t know as I have.
More experiments; small paintings on spec
All three above were done experimentally on paper and “on spec” - that is, offered for sale rather than commissioned. Not only experiments in painting and gilding techniques, but in the crucial question, “Can I paint something and sell it to someone without a commission? Can I do all these things that I’ve not only never done before, but never thought of doing before? Which I would have previously assumed was too difficult?” All of them sold, fairly quickly. And not even all to friends, but to people I didn’t know. OK, the answer seems to be yes. Good to know. Add that to the file.
Through these works, I learned that people love to watch the process, so I did a lot of photos and video clips of their development, and posted to the studio blog a lot, and everyone really seemed to enjoy it. This seems like a good model to keep following; painting as spectator sport.
More commissions; more experiments
It still sometimes feels very implausible. How come I get to to this? And why doesn’t it feel like work?
OK, sometimes it does feel like work. But that’s a good thing. It means that a work-ethic comes into play, focus and concentration channelled by a steady schedule, driven by a deadline. At least, that’s the ideal we’re shooting for.
And that’s the point of all this; to re-orient my life and frame of mind towards this work and then to turn it outward to maybe benefit others. To go from Hilary White, unhappy journalist, to Hilary White: Sacred Art.
All this is why it takes a long time to finish a piece; I’m learning by doing.
And each of the paintings of the last year was a new set of experiments with techniques, materials and methods. Gilding, gold tooling, sgraffito, painting on paper and other surfaces.
Another experiment that started a few months ago is to see if I can start using watercolour techniques in iconography…
I’m even having a go at some online watercolour tutorials, to make a change.
I’ve discovered this awesome thing, “nihonga” - literally “Japanese painting” - using watercolour techniques, with a linear drawing style similar to Byzantine painting, making paint by mixing dry pigments and collagen glue - and I want to learn it.
The language barrier is kind of a problem, but I’m getting there… closing in.
Vertical learning curve
I’ve given myself a ballpark of five years to learn all the basic things to get started, to get on to the next phase of combining all the ideas into a coherent style, to have enough technical competence to start expressing ideas freely. Three of these have already elapsed - I may have to apply for an extension.
The mountain of things to learn is so enormous the only way forward is to fully commit to the process itself, rather than a pre-determined final goal. Frankly, I might not live that long, so I better not wait for 20 years until I know what I’m doing before I enjoy it.
Competence in drawing, as rare a skill as it is and difficult even to find a place that teaches it, is only the starting point.
The technical aspects of painting are like an apprenticeship in alchemy:
Colour mixing - I make all my own paints out of only a few dry pigments mixed with egg yolk medium, a mixture of egg yolk, vinegar and distilled water
The mechanical and chemical properties of different pigments
Supports and primers - how to make my own gesso and all about commercial priming products, treating watercolour paper with gesso or rabbit skin glue, painting on icon panels and prepared gesso panels
Mediums - the binder or “glue” that holds pigment together and makes it stick to a surface - oils, egg tempera, acquarello, Gum Arabic, collagen glue (distemper), additives like mastic and damar, ox gall and other thinners and various chemical treatments to create effects like granulation
Varnishes (synthetic and natural), fixatives, waxes and their solvents & their archival properties
Gilding - water gilding and size gilding, including surface preparation with Armenian bole, decorating with sgraffito, pastiglia and tooling,
Methods of application (actual painting technique) - paint goes on a surface by all sorts of different methods; brushing, sponging, floats (puddles of medium where the pigment is dropped in), washes and glazes…
All the fine, minute details of how to do it, that no book or YouTube video can teach you. You just have to give it a go.
Annunciation
All the accumulated things over the last three years (plus the four years studying drawing) have culminated in this largest and most complex project to date, a real test:
Levelling up my gilding and gold tooling and stamping skills…
Long way to go. I’m taking it as slowly as it needs to go.
Returning to writing and research: a Sacred Art crusade
All this is just more or less to explain why I haven’t really been writing much. But that’s what I’m determined to remedy from here on.
I’ve got plans…
Most of the time I just want to paint. I crave that feeling of being lost in the flow of the work. It’s the same feeling, being suspended from ordinary material reality and time, as praying, singing the Divine Office or being at Mass. I fall into some sort of altered state of awareness where my jabbering brain is quieted. When I finish drawing or painting for the day, I feel like I’ve woken from a deep sleep.
But there is another urge that is growing: to share. I am so excited by the wonderful things I’m discovering that I just burst to tell someone. So, writing. I had an idea people were ready for it, and ready to leave the polemics behind, when I meet a nice young American priest here who, when introduced, said, “Oh, you’re the lady who paints the beautiful icons,” with no hint of anything else. I guess it means I’ve successfully moved on.
I started this Substack in April 2021, the spring before moving to Narni, with a plan to post twice a week - or at least to write twice a week - but that almost immediately slid away, and I’ve posted only sporadically since then. The trouble was I didn’t figure after over 20 years of writing online that I had anything left to say. And I didn’t want to talk about the old stuff anyway.
But in the last year I’ve finally retrieved a sense of having something to talk about. And I’ve found, that surprised me, other people are interested too. I’ve noticed that the Twitter threads where I post lots of pictures of Gothic or Trecento painting, explaining what it is and how it was done, get enormous responses.
The people who follow me are, for the most part, Latin rite Catholics, mostly devoted to the Traditional liturgy, who love beautiful sacred art but know very little about it. Every time I’ve posted a thread on the details of the tradition the response has been huge. People love these beautiful paintings, they respond instinctively to traditional Western sacred art, but don’t know why they feel so drawn to it. There is a great hunger for a deeper and more detailed understanding of what they’re looking at.
A few months ago a lady in the US approached me to commission the Annunciation. When we started talking about the details I introduced her to the works of the Italian Trecento, especially Simone Martini and Lorenzo Monaco.
She exclaimed that she had never seen anything like it before, something so beautiful, so ethereal, that she could not have imagined anything so uplifting. She had only seen Renaissance and 18th and 19th century paintings of this classic Christian subject, and had no idea that the Trecento and Italian Gothic even existed. And this is normal. People have seen more than they need of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo.
I think we should talk about this. So this represents something of a re-launch.
Building something completely my own: email list business model
Since the new year I’ve been reading and listening to podcasts and videos about how to develop your own online media platform - expanding on the old blogging idea by creating a private audience of readers. Now the thing is to use an email list, rather than just cast the material out there to the general world on social media platforms, trusting in the kindness of The Algorithm.
Everyone who does this sort of thing seems to agree that Substack is the best for this. And they’re constantly expanding their services to authors to include more ways to share - podcasts and chats and things. The model they use is the thing everyone suggests; building a readership audience through a private email list. With a decent sized email list, you can have room to grow, to create and promote new things.
So, back to my goal of Wednesdays and Saturdays, and scheduling posts. Also, keeping posts short (sorry about this one), with the idea of gathering them together, grouped into topics and turning them into e-books. This is in aid of the idea I floated last year, that got a very positive response, to develop a curriculum or course in Christian sacred art for homeschoolers. Gather those e-books together and you’ve got a whole course.
I’ve got a few other ideas percolating. What about a sacred art podcast? I know quite a few articulate people who are doing this kind of work. Wouldn’t it be fun to talk to them? And I live in central Italy, a place that literally has ancient sacred art just lying around. Wouldn’t it be fun to take a video camera around and look at some of it, and talk about it? Sacred art mini-documentaries, like Sr. Wendy or Sir Kenneth Clark?
Maybe most ambitious is my idea for courses. There are a lot of good online platforms and apps now to help people create courses. I was thinking along the lines of basic drawing courses for adults and younger people which could be incorporated into a homeschool programme. It will take some work to figure out the best way to do it, but I meet so many people who would like to know how to draw, but have no idea how to get started.
And all of this leads to my request.
What is a patron of the arts in the internet age?
Back in the day, a child with some promise would be apprenticed to the studio of an established painter, as Leonardo was at 15 to the studio of Verrocchio. The golden age of Renaissance painting in Florence was entirely dependent on financial backers of patrons, the most famous of whom was Lorenzo de Medici, “the Magnificent”. Such a patron would not only commission works of art but would support the studio’s work in other ways, among which was to sponsor apprentices. The apprentice sponsored would remain in a relationship of friendship and collaboration with the patron, often for the rest of his life.
In our time, that system is long gone, and those who want training in the old academic skills have to somehow come up with the cash to support their four years in the atelier. While I was in that training, I had to pay for my classes ad hoc and it was often a struggle to balance work and study.
But at the same time, I had friends who acted as patrons, often helping pay for an entire season’s worth of classes at once. Without them, I would certainly not have been able to complete the course, and would not be doing this work today.
I have found that there are a lot of people out there who are interested enough in the work I’m doing to commission complex works and to donate to keep the work and learning going forward. It’s been immensely fulfilling to have found the relationships that develop from that sponsorship and patronage. These are often people who, like myself, have found the way the cultural world is heading to be unsatisfactory, and who want to do something concrete about it. It helps everyone to feel less alone.
Whenever I have reached out with a specific need - as I did a few months ago when I needed a large professional studio easel - I’ve found the response has been tremendous. There’s a lot going wrong in the world; it is a pretty great feeling, I think, to do something, even a small thing, to reverse the trends, and it’s clear people want to help.
If you feel like you would like to participate in this work, to help it grow and develop, and can manage it financially, I invite you to set up a recurring donation through my support page, Hilary White; Sacred Art. And many, many thanks to those who have already done so, and have contributed one-time donations.
I’ll be forthright: I need a steady income of at least 1000 Euros per month that I can count on. This would cover expenses for shelter and food. This would mean that commission fees could be freed to cover supplies for more work. The beauty of living in the sticks is the low cost of living. It doesn't need to be a lot from any one person. 10€ or 20€ per month from 50 people will cover rent & most expenses. This would mean no one person needs to pledge a lot; the point is consistency and a good-size community
Would you like to help me get there with a recurring donation?
I am always grateful for - couldn’t survive without, in fact - one-time donations, but it is a bit of a precarious way to live. If we could to build up a group of people who are especially keen to be involved, it could be like having a kind of Greek Chorus of supporters and friends to rely on and with whom I could be “in cahoots” - to save classical Western sacred art and with it, perhaps, some small section of the civilisation we all love. And if it works out, I could stop worrying how the next electric bill is going to be covered.
Benefits could include exclusive access to podcasts and/or a chat group - Substack provides these now - more in-depth conversation, answers to questions, a chance to connect with like-minded people around the world, and maybe occasional gifts of experimental paintings. If you’d like to talk about it more, please do email me.
I’ve come to understand in the last year that this is me now, this is my new life. It’s established and I want it to expand and grow, and I hope you will be able to come along with me. To that end, regular World of Hilarity posts will always be free to all, and I’ll be working to get back to the original idea of posting twice a week.
Thank you for coming along this far, most especially to my generous (and patient!) clients and patrons. Let’s keep encouraging each other.
A prossima3.
Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom. If you would like to support my work researching and recreating classical Christian sacred art in traditional techniques, you can subscribe to and donate my Ko-Fi page, Hilary White; Sacred Art. I am always grateful for donations to keep the lights on. And feel free to drop a comment in the box. Let’s talk.
For the new, I started writing in the late 90s about new reproductive technologies, cloning and manipulation of the human genome - and the brand new “ethics” that went along with all of it. This research led me into the pro-life movement as a writer and researcher and giver of talks, eventually leading into legislative analysis and political briefs and a brief flirtation with lobbying until I burnt out spectacularly. After that I was eleven years with LifeSiteNews - during their respectable news outlet phase - until I left in 2015, writing for a time exclusively for the Remnant Newspaper, where I still occasionally pop up like a bad penny.
I once accidentally touched a Fra Angelico. They don’t cordon them off with ropes here, or cover them with glass. You can get right up to them. No alarms either. So I was nose to nose with this incredible thing, with my magnifying lens looking at the brush strokes, and accidentally brushed it very gently with the back of my hand as I leaned in. I yelped and leapt backwards, expecting to be wrestled to the ground by a pack of enraged carabinieri, and probably thrown out of the country, but nothing happened. Not a thing.
I promise subsequent posts won’t be this long or this introspective.
But I am getting better. Your art is lovely. Keep going
Beautifully written - thank you for sharing - it blessed me on many levels.